I'm not special. Lots of people know this story, and understand why it's important. But I may be the first professor you've had to point out that the surface story the data is telling us is often very different from the truth.

Here's another example, entitled "The Wittgenstein Test" that Scott Sumner (a macroeconomist from Bentley) posted on EconLog about a week ago. He has 5 examples saying pretty much the same thing: maybe the Great Recession didn't mean what we think it means. The best one is # 2. We've been told endlessly that there was a speculative bubble in real estate prices. If there was a bubble, prices would run up, and then collapse rapidly. At first glance this sounds like a reasonable description of our experience around the Great Recession. Except the Great Recession was global, so it behooves us to look at global data. Here's that data:

Oops. That kind of looks like 1) a run-up in prices that was driven by a common global factor, followed by 2) a dispersion of price behavior across countries because the common global factor went away and was replaced by locally important ones. Gee ... almost like there never was a bubble at all.

The beauty of the asset bubble story is that is supports a view that market behavior is both irrational and unbeneficial. My ... what an interesting position to gain popularity in the U.S. during a period when government has been dominated by a party with an agenda to increase government regulation.

All I'm saying is that when you learn (and do) macroeconomics you need to be aware that a lot of analyses amount to "just-so stories".